The UK banking giant announce today an agreement to team up with Illinois-based investment firm Elkhorn Capital Group to collaborate on new investment strategies and products.

As Ben Fulton, Elkhorn’s founder and chief executive, commented:

We are seeing a greater demand for more custom investment products across a variety of market segments. By partnering with Barclays, we are able to offer clients a range of innovative investment opportunities.

Does the name Fulton sound familiar? It should. He’s an ETF industry insider. The former director of global ETFs at Invesco Powershares, left in 2013, and after a bit of a hiatus from the industry’s epicenter, launched his own suite of products earlier this year.

In 2014, he weighed in on exchange-traded funds in an ETF special report published by Barron’s, along with Matt Hougan of ETF.com and Scott Ebner of State Street’s SPDRs.

This is hardly the first partnership for Barclays. Earlier this month, the bank paired with Nouriel Roubini on factor-based stock indexes.

The answer is “no,” according to Suki Cooper, a commodity analyst at Barclays. In a recent note, Copper and her team today laid out case for the metal’s rebound in 2015, forecasting a price of $6,313 per ton for the year.

Because the industrial and consumer sectors make wide use of the metal, investors closely watch movements in the world’s copper price, using it as a barometer of global economic activity. It is often called “Dr. Copper – the metal with a PhD. in economics.

At TK, the metal has fallen 9% over the past six months.

“The quarter to watch is Q2 because we believe that is when copper prices will rise the most and set the tone for the rest of the year,” wrote Cooper. She added:

From this analysis, we have produced our outlook on prices for 2015 and 2016. We expect copper prices to rise in Q2 to $6,300/t as demand returns. In Q3, we expect them to continue to rise to $6,600/t, before easing in Q4 to $6,500/t. We expect an annual price of $6,313/t in 2015 and $6,250/t in 2016. We base our analysis on historical price movements, the projected supply and demand balance, and our qualitative judgment of market conditions. At the core of our approach is the thesis that over the medium term, fundamentals drive metals prices; because we believe the fundamentals of the copper market show a tight market, we remain bullish for the year.

Not everyone shares that outlook. Last week, Morgan Stanley cut its price forecasts for almost all base metals and bulk commodities as China’s “dormant” industry fails to bolster demand in the world’s biggest consumer of copper and iron ore. The firm cut its copper forecast for 2015 by 16% to $5,945 a ton and reduced its 2015 estimate by 14% to $6,283 a ton.

On the ETF arena, the United States Copper Index Fund (CPER) fell 0.87% to $18.43.

South Korea, Israel, Taiwan and the Czech Republic are “countries that bond investors generally classify as EM,” the bank says in a release explaining the moves. All four countries will be considered “emerging” for the purposes of Barclays’ emerging-market bond indices, including those for hard currencies, local currencies and inflation-linked securities, the release said.

It may sound like just another cloistered debate among indexers. But it matters even to ordinary U.S. investors, since so many billions of dollars are now indexed to these benchmarks. Billions in South Korean stock-market exposure will be removed from the Vanguard Emerging Markets (VWO) alone at some point over the next several months.

That’s because the ETF is switching indexes from an MSCI Inc. (MSCI) benchmark that counts Korea an emerging market, to one built by the U.K.’s FTSE Group, which does not. MSCI has cited currency-convertibility issues for keeping Korea in the “emerging” column.

On a price basis, VXX is down more than 75% this year, while UVXY and TVIX are down by 95%-96%.

A handful of other volatility-themed products have performed better due to their very different index construction.

The Barclays S&P 500 Dynamic Vector ETN (VQT), a complex mix of stocks and volatility futures that’s up a little more than 4% this year, has enjoyed $187 million in inflows, or more than half its $353 million in assets. The iPath S&P 500 Dynamic VIX ETN (XVZ), down 8.8% on the year, holds $318 million, more than half of which also showed up this year.

The VelocityShares Daily Inverse VIX ETN (XIV), a kind of backdoor bullish bet on the stock market that’s up 171% this year, has seen investors pull out $458 million this year, leaving it holding $275 million.

Correction 5:12 p.m.: This post initially said the products “burnt through more than twice as much money” as investors currently hold in them. The figures are $4.5 billion versus $1.9 billion. That’s once over and then some. Not “more than twice.”

We missed the Friday press release, but it’s reverse split time again for the most popular exchange-traded note used to “trade” market volatility.

The Barclays iPath S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures ETN (VXX), holding a basket of futures on the CBOE Volatility Index, is set for a 1 for 4 reverse split next week. As it happens, the press release is unclear: It refers to “Thursday October 5.” But Thursday is actually Oct. 4th. Friday is the 5th. We’ve put a query into Barclays to find out which. The press release says the record date is the close on Oct. 4, so in all likelihood, it takes place on Friday Oct. 5.

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